Site Mobile Navigation

Larry L. King, Texan Author and Playwright, Dies at 83

Larry L. King, a journalist, essayist and playwright with a swaggering prose style and a rollicking personal one, who left Texas as a young man but never abandoned it in his work — turning out profiles of politicians, articles on the flaws and foibles of American culture, searching autobiographical essays and, most famously, the book for the Broadway musical “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” — died on Thursday in Washington. He was 83.

The cause was emphysema, his wife, Barbara Blaine, said.

A prolific writer for Texas Monthly, Harper’s, Playboy and other magazines, Mr. King had a big personality suffused with humor, characteristics evident in his work. Critics often noted his affinity for the wordplay, wry attitude and joy in the existence of scalawags that were hallmarks of Mark Twain. Nor was he, like Twain, loath to cast aspersions on the dull, the self-righteous and the oafish.

“There are ‘good’ people, yes, who might properly answer to the appellation ‘redneck,’ ” he wrote in Texas Monthly in 1974, “people who operate Mom-and-Pop stores or their lathes, dutifully pay their taxes, lend a helping hand to neighbors, love their country and their God and their dogs. But even among a high percentage of these salts-of-the-earth lives a terrible reluctance toward even modest passes at social justice, a suspicious regard of the mind as an instrument of worth, a view of the world extending little further than the ends of their own noses and only a vague notion that they are small quills writing a large history.”

“The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” written with Peter Masterson, was based on an article Mr. King wrote for Playboy about the closing of the Chicken Ranch, a brothel near La Grange, southeast of Austin, that operated illegally for decades with the tacit approval of the local authorities. With music and lyrics by Carol Hall and choreography by Tommy Tune, the show, which opened on Broadway in 1978, had a winking, naughty spirit that caught on, and in spite of less than stellar reviews, ran for four years, more than 1,500 performances.

Mr. King ranged widely in his books. “The One-Eyed Man” is a mid-1960s novel about the struggle to integrate a southern university. “In Search of Willie Morris: The Mercurial Life of a Legendary Writer and Editor” (2006), is an account of his friendship with Morris, who as editor of Harper’s in the late 1960s gave Mr. King his first national exposure as a writer. “Confessions of a White Racist” (1971) is a startling autobiographical work about the impossibility of expunging the racial bias ingrained in him as a boy and the complicity of every white American in the maintenance of the status quo. It was nominated for a National Book Award.

Photo

Larry L. King was a prolific writer for Texas Monthly, Harper’s, Playboy and other magazines.Credit
Alexandria King

“The town where I was born discouraged Negro residents,” Mr. King wrote in “Confessions.” “I was 15 before moving to where the black man was even statistically visible. The citizens of our little town willingly fed most depression hoboes who hopped off freights on the Texas & Pacific to beg food at our back doors. When an infrequent black hobo appeared, however, he was driven away with outraged oaths and threats to call the constable.”

Lawrence Leo King was born on Jan. 1, 1929, in west Texas, in the town of Putnam, “kind of near Abilene, but not really near anything,” his wife, Ms. Blaine, said. He grew up mostly on a rural farm until his family moved to Midland, where he went to high school. His mother, Cora Lee Clark, read Twain to him as a boy. His father, Clyde Clayton King, was a farmer and a blacksmith and the subject of one of his son’s best-known essays, “The Old Man.”

Young Larry never graduated from high school; he left to join the Army just after World War II and served most of his stint in the New York area making training films. When he got out, he got his first writing job at The Hobbs Daily Flare, a New Mexico newspaper, and later briefly attended Texas Technological College, now Texas Tech University, in Lubbock.

In the mid-1950s he moved to Washington as an aide to a Texas congressman, J. T. Rutherford. Later he joined the staff of another Texas representative, Jim Wright, the future speaker of the House. He left in 1964 to become a full-time writer. In spite of his lack of formal education, he was granted a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard for the 1969-70 academic year and wrote about it for Harper’s in an essay called “Blowing My Mind at Harvard.”

“The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” was made into a 1982 film starring Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton, and a sequel to the stage musical, “The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public,” appeared briefly on Broadway in 1994.

Photo

Dolly Parton and Robert Mandan in the 1982 film version of Mr. King’s musical, “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.”Credit
Universal City Studios

Mr. King wrote several other plays that appeared Off Broadway or in regional or college theaters, including “The Night Hank Williams Died,” set in a Texas bar in 1952, and “The Kingfish,” written with Ben Z. Grant, a one-actor play about Huey P. Long. He also wrote television documentaries, including “The Best Little Statehouse in Texas,” depicting the horse-trading and backroom dealing characteristic of Texas politics.

Mr. King’s first marriage, to Wilma Jeanne Casey, ended in divorce. His second wife, Rosemarie Coumaris Kline, died in 1972. In addition to Ms. Blaine, whom he married in 1978 and who was also his lawyer and agent, his survivors include their son, Blaine, and their daughter, Lindsay King Arnault; three children from his first marriage, Alexandria King, Kerri Mitchell and Bradley Clayton King; and two grandsons.

For many years Mr. King was a fixture in New York literary circles and Washington political ones. A habitué of George Plimpton’s celebrated Paris Review soirees and a frequent partygoing companion of the flamboyant Texas congressman Charlie Wilson — “they used to just live it up,” Ms. Blaine said — he was celebrated for his storytelling as well as for his drinking, which he gave up some three decades ago (much to the surprise of many who knew him) at the behest of his wife not long after the birth of Lindsay.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

“I’ve got a lot of stories about falling off the wagon with Larry,” Celia Morris, Willie Morris’s former wife, said in an interview on Friday. The night Lindsay was born, she said, she was in bed with her husband — at the time it was the Texas congressman Robert Eckhardt — “and the doorbell began ringing excessively.”

Mr. King was in front of the house, she said.

“He was yelling that Lindsay had just been born, and he fell into a rosebush, so we came down and we all got drunk.”

Ms. Blaine, hearing the story repeated, said: “You know, you can put that in the paper, but Larry always said that never happened. Of course I wasn’t there.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 22, 2012, on Page B8 of the New York edition with the headline: Larry L. King, Texan Author and Playwright, Dies at 83. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe